I feel saddened at the typically accepted notion that the president is elected as commander-in-chief. Somehow the sages of journalism have interpreted, as a result of some extracurricular activities of various presidents over the years, that because the term CIC is present in Article 2 and since the president’s duties fall under this same article, the president is automatically CIC. Perhaps they should read the lines more carefully (or maybe I should) where this nomenclature is used in the Article then refer to Article I and the powers of congress and the possibilities of an army or a navy. And he is not elected commander-in-chief, be he Barack Obama or Donald Trump. He is elected president.
But I don’t think that would matter to these “sages.” Anyone who had pulled himself so far from the explicit (and few) words in the constitution is not going to be bothered with such trivialities as congress may or may not provide for an army or navy. And, at least in the case of an army it is supposedly restricted to funding at two-year clips. And the militia is supposedly called up as a repellant in emergency invasions, at which point the president becomes, at least for a while, the CIC.
I get the feeling that people who toss the phrase around as if they have great respect for it just have some special joy in its use as if they would love to proudly “salute” when the president strolled by as if viewing Washington at Yorktown following the British Surrender; that they see this master of the military, if a member of their party, as an icon of courage leading us as MacArthur did back to the Philippines. And, like some South American dictator, he will stand on the balcony of the White House (the people’s house, of course) and wave a sword and free the world, because he is also, you know, The Leader of the Free World — oh, hooray, hooray!
The news these days comes largely from television with a cast of reporter-journalists-entertainers, whatever? who perform like high school teenagers and gabble to report, “journalize,” on our big screens. Just as they garble language (“less people,” “the president he,” “if I would have,”…) they pervert the definition of the republic and its rules and creations, and babble it in a litany of “sort of” and “continue on,” punctuations to extend mostly dull remarks.
“The country has just elected a new commander in chief,” I hear, and pause to think that this recitalist probably gets an overly fat paycheck that would put a Grammy winner to shame. As stated above, it did not elect any such thing, but no one will ever get the bastion Babes and white collar Bubbas to understand, I fear. They have been corrupted, academically, by a national educational system that has given us a national capital full of the biggest fools since April 1 was “invented.”